The Writers Place, a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting the literary arts through community outreach, continues its Winter-Spring writing workshop series with The Golden Shovel, a poetry writing workshop.  The session will be held from 11 AM to 2 PM, February 29, at the Pilgrim Center, 3807 Gilham Road.  It explores a creative writing technique in which poets take a line from a favorite work and use each word to create a new poem, each line of the new work ending with a word from the admired poem.

Jermaine Thompson, who holds a Masters of Fine Arts from the University of Missouri—Kansas City (UMKC), leads the session.  Thompson, whose work has been published in a variety of venues including Memorious, Whale Road Review and Southern Indian Review, is a board member at The Writers Place.  He teaches creative writing at UMKC and English at Pembroke Hill Upper School.

The Golden Shovel is the latest is a series of workshops planned by The Writers Place.  Upcoming sessions delve into playwrighting and ekphrastic writing which is creative technique that expands on the meanings in vivid art imagery.

“Our workshop series is just one aspect of our community outreach,” says Maryfrances Wagner, The Writers Place board vice president, “but it’s one of the most interactive.  Sessions like The Golden Shovel are part of a strategy to introduce Kansas City writers to creative techniques they wouldn’t be exposed to elsewhere.”

Session attendance is free, but donations to The Writers Place are welcomed.  Reserve seats at thewritersplace.wildapricot.org/events.